What are Newsgroups?

News groups is a way of sharing news and other information with other newsgroups and users. It is like a bulletein noard to which people can post notes for others to read. Newsgroups may cover any topic renaging from art and fashion to computers and internet. It has long been one of the favorites for sharing information over the net.

Many programs called newsreaders are available to help accessing and managing the discussions posted on a newsgroup. It provides options to select topics to display informatio about and filter other topics from the newsreader, and for showing only the recent posts since last visit or program usage by the user.

Newssgroups are hosted on news servers; a computer that is setup to collect and matain the news posts. A single server can host many newsgroups. You can find newsgroups on practically any subject. Although some newsgroups are moderated, most of them are not. Moderated newsgroups are owned by someonewho reviews the postings, can answer questions, delete inappropriate messages, filter out topics and so forth.

News Servers

News Servers are the computers which collect news from different places like USENET, local news sources, mail reflectors etc. and manages them. Most of the news server's newsgroups are a part of USENET (User Network) which refers to all the computers that distribute newsgroup information.